Teacher Evaluations Fall Off The Education ‘Reform’ Agenda

11/24/2015 – Teacher Evaluations Fall Off The Education ‘Reform’ Agenda:

Teacher Evaluations Fall Off The Education ‘Reform’ Agenda

THIS WEEK: Opt Outs Hit Half Million … Teachers Need Affordable Housing … NCLB For Higher Ed … High School Student Activism … States Take Over Education

TOP STORY

Teacher Evaluations Fall Off The Education ‘Reform’ Agenda

By Jeff Bryant

“Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently shook up the education policy world when she challenged one of the pillars of the education establishment for the last 10-15 years, that teachers’ job evaluations and pay should be linked to how students – even students they don’t teach – perform on standardized tests … The important story isn’t as much about what Clinton said as it is about the response it got from the establishment that’s been in charge of education policy for nearly three decades.”
Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

At Least 500,000 Students In 7 States Sat Out Standardized Tests This Past Spring

The Washington Post

“About 500,000 public school students in seven states ‘opted out’ and refused to take federally required standardized tests in math and reading in the spring … New York 240,000 students opted out, New Jersey 110,000, Colorado 100,000, Washington state 50,000, Oregon 20,000, Illinois 20,000 and New Mexico 10,000… A study released last month found that the number of standardized tests US public school students take has exploded in the past decade, with most schools requiring too many tests of dubious value.”
Read more …

Can Affordable Housing Help Retain Teachers?

American Prospect

“A great deal of evidence has shown how homelessness and housing insecurity can negatively impact a student’s behavior … Less attention has been paid to the relationship between educators and their housing … Efforts to attract, or retain, teachers through subsidized housing is growing more pronounced, and debates over how such projects impact their surrounding communities are likely to intensify in the coming years … Maybe subsidized housing that targets young professionals won’t be what it takes to help attract career educators, yet it’s clear that cities do want to help recruit and retain educators who actually live in the communities in which they serve – an effort that may require more than just a salary increase.”
Read more …

The University Of North Carolina’s New President Should Scare Anyone Who Cares About Higher Ed

The Nation

Zoë Carpenter writes, “After the board that governs the University of North Carolina unexpectedly fired system president Tom Ross … it chose someone outside the state’s conservative machinery: Margaret Spellings, former secretary of education under George W. Bush. Spellings is a seasoned political operative; Karl Rove introduced her to Bush … Spellings went on to work in the troubled for-profit [college] industry after leaving the White House – an experience, she told UNC’s board of governors, that taught her ‘a lot about how we can serve our students and think of them as customers in providing a product in convenient ways for them.'”
Read more …

The Other Student Activists

The Atlantic

“A surge of student activism has swept across academia in recent weeks as black students and their allies forcefully call attention to racist climates on American college campuses … High-school youth are flexing their collective muscles for equity: fighting budget cuts and out-of-school suspensions as they take on racial issues and academic offerings …. Many youth today are not content to be on the sidelines. Like several hundred Chicago teens who rallied against public-school cutbacks and potential teacher layoffs earlier this month … Similarly, Philadelphia students, rocked by a severe school-funding crisis, took to the streets this fall to protest cuts to neighborhood schools … At the root of student organizing is the demand for fair and equal treatment.”
Read more …

The Fight Over K-12 Education Appears Headed Back To The States

The Washington Post

“Congress is expected to take a final vote on a bill to replace No Child Left Behind, the current federal law, after Thanksgiving … The bill is expected to pass and the White House has indicated that President Obama will sign it … The greatest change in the proposed law is a dismantling of the federal accountability system that defined whether K-12 schools were successful, prescribed actions to improve struggling schools, and imposed penalties on states and schools that failed to make progress. It also prevents the federal government from requiring states to evaluate teachers and principals and adopt specific academic standards … Decisions about how to identify successful and struggling schools and teachers, how much weight to give to test scores, and how and when to intervene in struggling schools will be left to each state.”
Read more …

11/24/2015 – Teacher Evaluations Fall Off The Education ‘Reform’ Agenda:

Book Review: A Teacher’s Tale by John Thompson

Book Review: A Teacher’s Tale by John Thompson:

Book Review: A Teacher’s Tale by John Thompson

Every so often, I will pick up a book that illuminates my own experiences, opens my eyes to the truth behind those events, and often helps me put a name to whatever I have been muddling through on my own. Oklahoma City educator John Thompson has written one such book.

Prior to downloading the Kindle version of A Teacher’ s Tale: Learning, Loving, and Listening To Our Kids on a Saturday evening, I’d followed Mr. Thompson’s writings in theHuffington Post, Scholastic Administrator, and Diane Ravitch’s blog. I had an opportunity to meet him at a workshop or event once, and we follow each other on Twitter. All that said, I had not really had a chance to delve into his teaching philosophy until a review of his new bookshowed up on my Facebook news feed.

The review including the following snippet from his book:

I was never a hat-snatcher. I did not believe in grabbing students’ contraband, whether it was hats, cell phones, marijuana, or gambling proceeds. So how did I find myself firmly holding half of a gang leader’s hat, ignoring the teenager’s threatening look?

I have been in the same boat a few times. I do not consider myself authoritarian, but yet I’ve had to take on that role in my classroom in order to maintain a semblance of order. My vision of teaching includes constructivist, project-based learning in which the students revel in the process of creating authentic learning artifacts, discovering truths about themselves and others, and mastering the skills they need to be effective communicators in our ever-changing world. Yet, I have had to take on a role of disciplinarian that I’m most uncomfortable with, particularly when students (and sometimes their parents) don’t appreciate that I’m trying to help them become the people they are capable of being, to reach the dreams they tell me about in their first-week-of-school writing exercises.

This has been true whether I’ve taught in a rural high school with a 35 percent poverty rate (based on free/reduced lunch eligibility), a racially diverse suburban middle school with a 85 percent poverty rate, a rural middle school with a 74 percent poverty rate, or a rural high school with a 64 percent poverty rate.

Over the years, I’ve struggled with the pedagogical dichotomy between the supportive teaching philosophy I aspire to, and the realities of managing 25 to 30 teenagers in a classroom during 7th hour. My ideas have worked in some schools, where principals Book Review: A Teacher’s Tale by John Thompson:

CURMUDGUCATION: MA: How To Gut a School District

CURMUDGUCATION: MA: How To Gut a School District:

MA: How To Gut a School District

Back in April of 2014, Jim Peyser was managing director of the NewSchools Venture Fund, a group set up to support "venture philanthropy" in the charter school world with grant-funneling, consulting, lobbying, etc. Think of them as bag men and enforcers for hedge funders interested in making a charter school buck or two.

That would make Jim Peyser and ordinary charter-pushing well-connected money man, but that was Peyser in April of 2014. But two days before Christmas of 2014, Santa brought Peyser a gift of the job of Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts. Not since the fox was hired to stand guard over the henhouse has a job been so cleverly filled, but Governor Charlie Baker loves him some charters and has thrown open the gate to every kind of charter shilling under the sun.

But the case of Peyser is unique, because as NewSchools Venture Honcho, Peyser laid out his ideas about how the path forward for gutting redesigning school districts. Take for instance the piece he published in that long-ago April, "Redesigning School Districts: The Way Forward."

He opens by quoting an imaginary friend who bemoans the fact that although charters are swell, they only serve a few students, and in order to "close the achievement gap at scale," the "real work" of fixing school districts must be done.

These friends and allies believe charters have successfully proven that it’s possible to create high-performing public schools in high-need neighborhoods, but now charters need to step aside so that their practices and systems can be taken to scale by enlightened district leaders.

Peyser wants to point out two problems with that view. You will perhaps be surprised to learn that neither of the problems are that charters have not actually successfully proven anything. Okay-- they've proven that will an infusion of resources and a carefully chosen student population, you can test prep your way to higher test scores. But we've known that since before charter schools were a CURMUDGUCATION: MA: How To Gut a School District:

New York Superintendents call for an end to evaluating teachers on standardized test results - Wait What?

New York Superintendents call for an end to evaluating teachers on standardized test results - Wait What?:

New York Superintendents call for an end to evaluating teachers on standardized test results

Labeling children on the basis of unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory standardized tests is bad public policy.  Evaluating teachers on the scores their students get on those tests is equally wrong, yet that is exactly what the policy is in the State of Connecticut.

Last spring, more than 500,000 students across the country were opted out of the standardized testing craze.

This unprecedented development was the direct result of a growing awareness by parents, students, teachers and public education advocates that the standardized testing scheme isn’t useful and that the Corporate Education Reform Industry is turning public schools into little more than testing factories.

While school superintendents and administrators have been a major part of the anti-standardized testing coalitions in New York, far fewer Connecticut school administrators have been willingly to step forward and speak up on behalf of the students, parents, teachers and public schools they are sworn to serve.

In contrast, in the Constitution State Madison Superintendent of Schools Thomas Scarice has consistently been one of the school leaders who has been willing to provide his students, parents, teachers and community with the appropriate information about the extraordinary problems that come with a public education system that is overly reliant on standardized testing.

(See for example, Superintendent Scarice addresses the powerful and ugly truth about SBAC testing charade and Madison Public School Superintendent Thomas Scarice makes national waves – again. and Diane Ravitch features Madison Superintendent Tom Scarice’s powerful letter on “education reform”)

With parents increasingly recognizing the inherent negative consequences that stems from the Common Core testing program, attention is now turning to the second major problem with the pro-Common Core, Pro-Common Core testing initiatives that have been sponsored by Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and the other political allies of the “Education Reformers” — and that is  — the inappropriateness of New York Superintendents call for an end to evaluating teachers on standardized test results - Wait What?:

New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color - WSJ

New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color - WSJ:
New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color
New York City initiative aims to have teaching staff better reflect student population

Timothy Chen, a computer-science teacher at Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in Manhattan, with students Raymercy Hiciano and Andrew Guerrero, during an introductory class on software engineering. PHOTO: STEVE REMICH FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

New York City is rolling out a $16.5 million initiative to recruit and retain nonwhite male teachers so that its teaching staff better reflects its student population.

The effort, led by the city’s Young Men’s Initiative, a group comprising dozens of local programs serving young black and Latino men, aims to add a total of 1,000 black, Latino and Asian men to New York City classrooms or into a teaching track by the fall of 2017.

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According to data from the city’s Department of Education, Black, Latino and Asian male students comprise 43% of the one million students in the city’s public prekindergarten, elementary, middle and high schools. But men of the same races make up 8.3% of the approximately 76,000 teachers at those schools.

“Our teaching force does not look like the students in the classroom,” said Richard Buery,deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives. “The city’s workforce should look like the city.”

The money behind the initiative is going toward professional development, advertising, guidance counselors and support for people getting teacher certification. The hiring effort is also intended to break a backward slide.

Most of the nonwhite men currently working as teachers have been employed by the city for 10 to 20 years, according to W. Cyrus Garrett, director of the Young Men’s Initiative, and some are nearing retirement age. At the same time, 8% of new hires, regardless of race or gender, quit in their first few years of teaching.

The city loses 450 to 500 nonwhite male teachers a year, Mr. Garrett said, and hires about 350.

Mr. Garrett and Mr. Buery said there was poor recruitment and retention of male teachers of color and cited several factors that they see as contributing to the problem.

Many such teachers are thrust into roles as school disciplinarians, called in frequently to de-escalate situations between students, Mr. Buery said. He described the phenomenon as the “ Joe Clark problem,” referring to the legendary baseball-bat-wielding principal of a school in Paterson, N.J., and the subject of the 1989 film “Lean On Me.”

ENLARGE

At the same time, these teachers are often the ones whom male students of color seek out for mentorship and support, as well as to serve as spokesmen or advocates, according to Amy Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Often male teachers of color “feel like they have to defend a lot of students against implicit biases or microaggressions,” said Ms. Wells. “If you’re the only teacher of color on a predominantly white faculty, that can get exhausting, especially when you’re working in an environment where most of your colleagues don’t necessarily understand what you’re saying.”

Timothy Chen, a second-year computer-science teacher at Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, doesn’t remember having a single teacher of Chinese descent in his hometown of Chelmsford, Mass., but he is one of three at his current school. He has heard from other teachers that some male students look up to him as a role model, he said, and relate to him by talking about videogames.

At the same time, “students can say some culturally insensitive things, both intentionally and innocently,” he said. “The conversation you have with the student following that had potential to be a very powerful New Push to Hire Male Teachers of Color - WSJ:

Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail - WSJ

Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail - WSJ:

Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail

The departing secretary of education says students aren’t getting the education the U.S. economy needs them to have

Arne Duncan has been pushing the cause of education all his career. And as he prepares to step down as education secretary after seven years, he is asking CEOs to join him in the fight.

In today’s global marketplace, it’s critical for the U.S. to develop in young people the skills that will keep America competitive. But across the nation, says Mr. Duncan, businesses continue having trouble finding enough college graduates with those skills.

Mr. Duncan, in discussing the successes and setbacks of his tenure, asked CEOs for help to improve education from top to bottom, and discussed other challenges in an interview with Wall Street Journal Deputy Editor in Chief Matt Murray. Edited excerpts follow.

MR. MURRAY: What skills do employers want and how well prepared is our education system to give them people with those skills?

MR. DUNCAN: People who can think critically, work in diverse teams, and who can take complex information, come to a conclusion and make a recommendation.

I can’t tell you how many CEOs I’ve met who say they can’t find young people with the skills they’re looking for.

JOURNAL REPORT

• Read more atWSJ.com/LeadershipReport

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So my request and my challenge is: We have lots of what I call phony debates about silly stuff. Could CEOs lend their considerable voice to, “Do we need high standards or not? Do we want to continue to reduce the dropout rate or not? Do we want to make sure our high-school graduates are truly college-ready? Do we want to lead the world in college-completion rates or not?”

These issues aren’t left or right or Democratic or Republican. This is in our nation’s best interest.

‘A better economy’

MR. MURRAY: What is the biggest undone item to better align the education system with the needs of the labor market?

MR. DUNCAN: Unfortunately, there are lots. I’m a huge believer in early childhood education. The return on investment is remarkable. But we have so many kids entering kindergarten a year, year-and-a-half behind. We often don’t catch them up.

The majority of our public-school students are African-American, Latino. We have to make sure we’re fighting the equity battle, we’re fighting for civil rights, we’re making sure that every young person has access to a great education. And we need folks at every level who are willing to fight not on small-ball stuff, not on sound bites, but on, “Are we educating our way to a better economy?”

MR. MURRAY: Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to make college free. How do we make college accessible and affordable?

MR. DUNCAN: These things should not be reduced to sound bites. Is college too expensive for many people? Yes, and we have to find ways to continue to reduce debt. We’ve talked about free community colleges. If we reduce costs and still have these same outcomes, it’s not good enough. The worst debt is the debt you get when you don’t complete your degree. The vast majority of young people who graduate from college get good jobs and pay back their debt.

With college completion rates so low, when you have debt and no diploma to show for it, that’s the conversation we need to be having.

ENLARGE

MR. MURRAY: College debt has roughly tripled in the past decade. How do we fix this?

MR. DUNCAN: Again, to be very clear, the vast majority of folks who are defaulting are folks who didn’t complete their degree. Yes, we can contain costs. That takes federal investment. It takes state investment. It takes universities containing their own costs. We put $40 billion into Pell grants without going back to taxpayers for a nickel. The goal has to be not just access. The goal has to be completion. It’s got to be around outcomes. That conversation around outcomes I’m not hearing on either side of the political spectrum.

College scorecards

MR. MURRAY: One of the big issues you’ve been involved in is college scorecards. You ran into opposition from the colleges on that front.

MR. DUNCAN: When you challenge the status quo, you get pushed back. That’s totally fine. We’re pushing very hard for transparency.

It’s a very difficult process to navigate. Young people should know, “What are the graduation rates,” not what the one-year cost is. “What’s the four-year cost? What are people like me making once they graduate from college?”

It’s interesting: 7,000 institutions of higher education, best system in the world, but it’s a broken marketplace. It’s absolutely inefficient. The vast majority of young people fill out the financial-aid form—they apply to one school.

I’m a believer in choice and competition. We think we all have this great choice. We really don’t. So we’re trying to expand more options, get that out there, and get more young people good information.

MR. MURRAY: Do you see room for the next secretary of education or president to advance this? You’ve run headfirst into opposition on that front a lot from all the higher educational institutions.

MR. DUNCAN: No worries.

MR. MURRAY: Can we make it happen?

MR. DUNCAN: It is happening. We’ve put unprecedented information out there to empower young people, their parents and college counselors to make good choices.

MR. MURRAY: Where does vocational training come in?

MR. DUNCAN: I’m a huge fan. Department of Labor has put $2 billion behind community colleges where real training is leading to real jobs.There are so many good jobs out there with a two-year community-college degree. We want to do more career and technical ed in the high-school space.

MR. MURRAY: The No Child Left Behind renewal, that may be coming out of committee?

MR. DUNCAN: This law’s been broken for seven, eight years. Folks are trying to work Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail - WSJ:

Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools | janresseger

Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools | janresseger:

Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools

After today, this blog will take a short break for the rest of this holiday week and return on Monday, November 30.  Good wishes for Thanksgiving!

In 1988, after the sudden death of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, the Illinois Legislature did something unusual. It created an experiment in truly democratic school governance in Chicago: the idea that parents, teachers, and community members would stand for election to local school councils whose members would have considerable power including the hiring of the school principal. When top-down school governance was instituted in 1995 by Mayor Richard M. Daley, who appointed Paul Vallas and then Arne Duncan to run the school district, the power of the elected local school councils faded. Arne Duncan brought Renaissance 2010, whose goal was to expand school choice, shutter so-called “failing” schools, and open 100 new schools—the very top-down school “reform” that has dominated Duncan’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education since 2009.

But the 25th Anniversary issue of Catalyst-Chicago features a retrospective examination of the elected local school councils that have persevered in many of the city’s schools: “Of all the reforms that have swept through Chicago Public Schools in the past 25 years, the creation of local school councils is one of the few that persists.”

Chicago’s local school councils have faced challenges from the beginning. Catalyst quotes Sokoni Karanja, an activist in the Bronzeville neighborhood who helped lead the movement to support and maintain what Chicago calls its LSCs: “In the first few years they were very effective and we saw major turnarounds at some schools.  And there are still diehard parents that maintain their commitment to the LSCs, although there has been continuous reductions in their power.”

Catalyst interviews Dion Miller Perez who chaired the Chicago office of what was the Cross-City Campaign for Urban School Reform and who was elected over the years to three LSCs: “There was a fickleness of funders supporting parental involvement in a grassroots way.  There used to be more foundation money for LSC training and parent involvement in general.  That doesn’t exist anymore.”

Elaine Allensworth, of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago comments on school improvement in the early 1990s, though she is hesitant to attribute the growth in test scores solely to direct democratic involvement of parents through the LSCs: “In that period just after decentralization, we do see improvements in a lot of schools.  A lot of schools did show improvements in student test scores, though it seemed to be related to the economic conditions in the community…. Then we start to see (scores) flatten out when mayor control came in.”

Catalyst ‘s anniversary issue features two parents who have been deeply involved through their LSCs.  These interviews expose not only the commitment of deeply involved parent leaders but also the challenges to parent involvement for schools in poor and working class communities.  Sabrina Jackson, part of the LSC at Perkins, Bass Elementary School in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, was involved to the degree that she could be as a parent employed full-time and attending community college through the years of her four children’s Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools | janresseger: